The amount of electronic data stored increases daily. The amount of data accessed by storage devices continues to grow. The number and type of storage devices used to store and access data used also continues to expand. Even as miniaturization and advancing technology increase the sophistication, reliability, and capacity of storage devices including hard disk drives, (HDD), solid state drives (SDD), shingled magnetic recording (SMR) devices, and tape drives, improved efficiencies are constantly sought for these devices. Improved efficiencies are needed because users who store data have finite resources. Finite resources may include electricity, cooling capacity, or physical storage space in which to locate storage devices. In particular, electricity is limited and may be costly. Additionally, as more and more storage devices store and access more and more data, the power and resources required to operate those devices, and to maintain the facilities in which those devices are stored, continues to increase.
One approach to improving the efficiency of electrical and other resource consumption in data storage is cold data storage. Conventional cold storage approaches may employ rack mountable apparatus that include entire rows of drives, row-level power supplies, and row-level electronics control modules. However, data is frequently accessed a column at a time, and not a row at a time. Conventional systems may cause a disk drive or other storage device in a row to be activated and power up when a column of data is accessed, which may in turn cause the row-level electronics module or other drives in the row to also power up. Thus, if a column of drives contains a number of drives, that number of row-level electronics modules will need to be powered up to access the column. Conventional systems thus may waste energy.
One conventional cold storage approach is the Open Compute Cold Storage system. Current Open Compute Cold Storage systems are built on storage nodes. A storage node may include thirty drives arranged in a row and a local electronics module associated with the row. A full rack may contain sixteen storage nodes. Conventional approaches are capable of allowing a maximum of two drives per storage node to operate at full power mode, which may be required for read or write operations. The remaining drives in a storage node may be spun down to operate in a power savings mode. However, conventional approaches still require all sixteen local electronics modules (one local electronics module for each row) to be powered up to full power mode even though each local electronics module only serves a maximum of two drives at any moment. The requirement to power up all sixteen local electronics modules puts a lower limit on the minimum power needed to read or write data from the full rack.